Lately, I’ve noticed an annoying trend by vendors. They are starting to put their content onto USB sticks, instead of CDs. Now, on the surface, this sounds really good. There’s less waste, since a USB stick is reusable, whereas a CD is usually obsolete within a month or two. However, vendors are taking a chunk of the stick, and permanently putting their content on. So on a 512 MB stick, less than 100 MB is taken up by some demo, along with a bunch of PDFs, and a whole partition exists just for that content. However, the 100 MB is permanent, and you cannot get it back by formatting the entire stick – I’ve tried.
I’ve got a perfectly good 512 MB stick that has 40 MB of a partition from 2007. There is nothing interesting on that partition now, and I can get much newer content off the vendor’s website, but it will remain there forever. I can understand wanting to make sure the client gets the content, but after some time, with stale content, why not give the client the ability to get the entire USB stick back? And I bet it would be cheaper to produce the sticks, too, instead of paying for the extra partitioning and autorun software.
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